The Quickest Route To Implementing Web Services

Merrick Stemen looks at the fastest, easiest way to program web services and offers examples implemented in the Water language. This article compares a Water language web server program with the equivalent Java programming.

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Despite having taught programming and computer science for more than 15
years, I'm still amazed sometimes; for example, when I discovered that I
could do NetBIOS programming in FORTH, CGI scripts in FORTRAN, or an SMTP client
in COBOL. (I was even amazed that I could actually
write new games
for the Mattel Intellivision game system.)

For programming web services, the biggest surprise has been the Water
language and the Steam XML IDETM, the Water development environment
and runtime engine by
Clear Methods, Inc. of
Cambridge, Mass.

The Discovery of Water

The thing that first attracted me to Water was a write-up in eWeek
magazine describing Water as an answer to what the founders at Clear Methods
considered to be some serious shortcomings in XML 1.0, and their suggestions for
creating a language that was
specifically written to
deal with XML and web services. I downloaded the demo, and I was hooked.

Because I compulsively explore each new language I run across, I immediately
began to devour every scrap of Water documentation I could find. I joined the
Water language discussion group
at Yahoo! and visited every link from
Waterlanguage.org. I
started writing short demo programs, trying out feature after feature, but my
favorite feature is the ease with which you can turn any Water program into a
web service.

Because Water is a language for web services, giving the programmer the
ability to create a web service with a minimum of code is a priority.
Here's a quick example. Suppose you want to deploy a web service that
provides a random number from 1 to 20 (inclusive) to clients. In Water, the
function might look like this:

<defmethod get_random >
20.<random_number />.<plus 1 />
</>

In other languages, adding the functionality to allow someone to access that
random number from a web browser client would add many lines of code to the
simple random-number generator. In Water, you would simply add this line:

<server get_random port=5656 />

And voilà! Just point your browser at http://localhost:5656/?, and the
random number comes right to the browser. No Apache web server, no Microsoft
IISjust Java and Steam XML.

With the new random-number server application on my machine, anyone who can
access the machine across the network can get a random number. Even other
applications can obtain the random number. Anyone else running Water on their
machine could point at my machine to get random numbers for their programs just
by adding this line:

An equivalent program written in ASP or PHP might be as short as this one,
but try running the ASP or PHP application on a machine that doesn't have a
web server already on it. It just isn't going to work.